Environmentalists won’t want to hear this, but the best hope for saving the planet may be another president named Bush.

Jeb Bush built solid green credentials during two terms as Florida's governor, spearheading a $1 billion public land acquisition program, Everglades restoration and water quality. Of late, he’s using his credentials as a fiscal conservative to challenge his party’s “anti-science” wing.

He’s no Al Gore, but Bush’s recent book tour — which continues Wednesday with a speech to the World Affairs Council in Dallas — has included an emphasis on energy that goes where few other Republican leaders have been willing to go: arguing the country’s natural gas boom can curb greenhouse gas emissions.

As Bush begins to position himself for a presidential run in 2016, former aides and even some greens admit he could be positioned to achieve global warming’s equivalent of a "Nixon to China" moment, especially if he had to work with a Democrat-led Congress.

“I can see him coming around to some combination of a cap-and-trade program as the best alternative to regulate and at the same time not completely abandoning his principles on something by going to a place where we’re scientifically uncertain,” said David Struhs, who served six years as the Bush-appointed head of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.

“Those are the kinds of conversations that he can engage in in a way that a less familiar politician, particular in the Republican Party, can’t do, even if they’re intellectually capable of it,” Struhs added. “They have to go hard right to prove they’re conservative. Jeb Bush is given a pass there because he’s already been there. He’s already done it.”

Greens of course won’t be jumping to volunteer for another Bush campaign, especially after eight tumultuous years battling Jeb’s brother on air and water pollution policies and complaints that the last White House muzzled climate scientists. Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden or another prominent Democrat will surely be most environmentalists’ first choice to replace President Barack Obama.

But there are also plenty of reasons why Jeb Bush could be the man to bring climate change legislation to the promise land, helping on an issue that’s dodged consensus for more than two decades and which lately has taken on an air of partisanship relegating it to Washington’s back-burner.

Consider how Republicans are connected to the country’s major environmental laws and policies. President Richard Nixon created the EPA and signed into law the Clean Air Act, National Environmental Policy Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, Marine Mammal Protection Act and Endangered Species Act. Aides to President George H.W. Bush helped construct the cap-and-trade concept and then crafted the last major set of amendments to the Clean Air Act in 1990.

And while George W. Bush was all over the place on climate change — he abandoned a 2000 campaign pledge to cap emissions from power plants and fought all the way to the Supreme Court against the premise that EPA even had the authority to regulate greenhouse gases — by the end of his second term, he’d come around in support of a cap-and-trade bill.

Under Obama, climate legislation has been trapped in a partisan logjam ever since the first-term passage of a House cap-and-trade bill and then the unsuccessful attempt to find 60 Senate votes on a companion measure. Some backers of tough climate policy say Jeb Bush could help bring Republicans back to a debate the party has not wanted to engage in because of Obama.

“When we have a Republican in the White House, it forces the Republicans representing moderate states or districts to show that they’re not captured by every plank of the Republican platform,” said one long-time climate policy advocate. “On this issue that probably means showing they’re more open to dealing with climate change than one might assume.”

Before Obama took office, a dozen Republican senators had sponsored, co-sponsored, voted for or spoke in favor of mandatory greenhouse gas reductions. “That was under George W. Bush. I can easily see it happening again with Jeb Bush in the White House,” the climate policy advocate added.

Since leaving Tallahassee, Jeb Bush hasn’t spoken about cap-and-trade legislation or gone very far into the weeds on what he’d do on the overall issue.

He didn’t respond to requests for comment for this story.

Associates say his silence is in part because of his reluctance to even engage on the question of whether he’ll run in 2016; that decision isn't expected to be made until next year.

But in a series of recent policy-themed speeches tied to his book on immigration, Jeb Bush has re-emerged with a willingness to nudge his party ahead on some of his other signature issues, including education and energy.

At the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Library last month in Simi Valley, Calif., Jeb Bush called for a bipartisan agreement on natural gas development that came with a direct reference to what that can do to tackle climate change.

“It’s something we should put aside the differences and apply with enthusiasm, create a strategy that would make that happen,” Jeb Bush said. “And if it did, imagine the benefits. We’d have the lowest cost energy source in the world to re-industrialize our country. It would lessen greenhouse gas emissions as more power is generated with natural gas and less from coal.”

Bush didn’t hesitate to swing at the Obama administration too, including Republican red meat reminiscent of the Mitt Romney campaign seeking approval of the Keystone XL pipeline and disbanding the Energy Department program that spawned Solyndra (even though the loan guarantees were first authorized by his brother’s signature on a 2005 law). Jeb Bush also talked about setting up more “rationale regulation for fracking” and emphasized the idea of using less energy.

“We should continue as we have been doing, to consume less,” Jeb Bush said. “The simple fact is that conservation is the cheapest energy policy that we can get. The energy we don’t use is the best means by which we can create a comprehensive strategy.”

Bush’s views on climate change science sound like they’re evolving. He told Tucker Carlson in a 2009 interview published in Esquire that he’s a “skeptic” on manmade global warming, adding that one problem is that the science “has been politicized.”

Two years later, Jeb Bush came to Rick Perry’s defense after the Texas governor questioned climate change science while on the presidential campaign trail. "I think global warming may be real," Bush told Fox Business News, before adding, “It is not unanimous among scientists that it is disproportionately manmade. What I get a little tired of on the left is this idea that somehow science has decided all this so you can’t have a view. Science has decided that embryonic stem cell research is the way to go and if you don’t agree with that then somehow you’re Cro-Magnon Man or something like that. Gov. Perry, as it relates to global warming has every right to suggest that it’s not a certainty.”

More recently, Bush has tried another approach. Speaking to the Conservative Political Action Conference last month near Washington, he challenged his party to consider an image makeover if it wanted to compete successfully at the ballot box.

Steve Seibert, who served as Bush’s secretary at the Department of Community Affairs, said Jeb Bush’s remarks to CPAC sounded to him like a signal he’d be willing to work on climate change policy.

“You look for puffs of smoke to try to understand what’s going on here, I thought Jeb was opening up the door here,” he said. He added that Bush remains "an economic development guy" and that "his equation will clearly be not doing environmental damage but also not doing economic damage.”

Personal views on climate science aside, Struhs said he’d expect a President Jeb Bush to demonstrate the same directness and pragmatism that aides saw in Florida. In Tallahassee, Bush would pepper staff with detailed questions drilling down on seemingly in-the-weeds items like a certain type of algae subspecies in the Everglades or the rationale for a new conservation easement. He had a green streak that even had Miami Herald columnist Carl Hiaasen offering up props for the governor's work on the Everglades.

“My experience is he has this great capacity to understand and learn those details and I think that’s what would make the difference on environmental issues,” Struhs said. “He’d see the fact that this is more than a simple ideological war, that this is really an issue where facts do matter.”

Allison DeFoor, a long-time GOP party leader in Florida who helped manage Jeb Bush’s Everglades restoration efforts, cited the money spent on land acquisitions for conservation to call his former boss “the best and greenest governor on the environment that Florida’s ever had.”

“I don’t think it’s about political expediency. He truly became what you’d call in the old fashion way a conservationist … in the Teddy Roosevelt tradition of our party,” DeFoor said. “Do I believe that’d continue? Sure, I do. They’re core values to him. I don’t think it’s political expediency for him, which is even better.”

Perhaps the biggest question facing Jeb Bush on the environment is whether he’d be able to maintain his stance on the issues through a GOP primary process that in 2012 pulled nearly all contenders to the right.

"He's smart enough to know the climate threat is real and smart enough to know his own party won't let him acknowledge it," said Beth Viola, a former Clinton White House environmental adviser.

“The Koch brothers. Their influence is not going away,” added Roger Ballentine, another former Clinton White House aide now heading the consulting firm Green Strategies.

Rob Sisson, president of ConservAmerica, a group of GOP moderates on the environment, said Bush’s religion — the Catholic Church has taken a prominent stance on climate issues — and the emphasis on education suggests he’d give close consideration to the science showing manmade emissions are changing the planet's climate.

“There are a handful of Republicans today who could lead a market-oriented effort to tackle climate change. The one who does enter the arena will be remembered a century from now just as we honor Theodore Roosevelt today. The only difference is, the person who tackles climate change will be revered around the world. Jeb Bush is capable of being that man,” Sisson said.

Ballentine, a top environmental adviser to John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign, said Jeb Bush could bring some bipartisan credentials to the debate that give him some hope — if it came to that.

“I still think from a perspective of climate, we’ll be better off with virtually any of the Democratic nominees. But among the Republicans, the one who I think might be in a position to provide some hope if they were in fact the president, I’d put Bush in the upper half of the list because of the Nixon to China syndrome.”

But Ballentine quickly added, “Nixon’s still got to want to go to China.”

This article first appeared on POLITICO Pro at 9:06 p.m. on April 23, 2013.